Witch Hunting explores the human being’s desire for empire and its capacity for self-sacrifice. On the bare stage, six dancers, men and women, divided into pairs of different dance styles – krumping, hip-hop and African urban dances – are spread across the space. On the principle of the battle, they make use of the virtuosity of their dance to define their zone of influence and to affect the other dancers’ movements. Individuals find fractions of common vocabulary and converge physically, consenting to uniting against those who oppose the fabricated consensus. In conditions where one can only win by putting others aside, the dynamics of scapegoating play in a cyclical manner, to the profit or detriment of each. The peculiarities of individuals submit to the authority of the united mass and fade away in order to tend towards conformity, whose continuity is ceaselessly challenged by dissidence.

Witch Hunting highlights the mechanisms by which groups are formed, dissolve and transform. By confronting different dance styles, which represent different visions of the body, different means of communicating and different worldviews, Anne Nguyen exposes the tensions between the notion of cultural identity and universalist principles, in light of a competitive system with limited opportunities.